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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. A new Brooklyn Museum exhibition examines the enduring legacy of the Great Migration, a period from 1910 to 1970 when millions of Black Americans packed up and left the South in search of more opportunity and a better life. The show features newly commissioned works by 12 contemporary Black artists, including quilts, photographs, paintings, and short films that depict the trails, the journeys, the trials, the aspirations of those who migrated.

For example, Max Bradford's 2022 wall piece is inspired by his family's migration story. It's titled 500, and it remixes an archival 1913 newspaper wanted ad printed on multiple tiles, calling for 500 families to live in an all-Black settlement of Blackdom, New Mexico. Other artists featured in the show include Carrie Mae Weems and Robert Pruitt. The show is called A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. It is up until June 25th. Joining us today is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, Kimberli Gant. Hi, Kimberli.

Kimberli Gant: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing well. Also joining us today to offer some historical context is Joshua Guild, an associate professor of History and African American Studies at Princeton University. Joshua, nice to meet you.

Joshua Guild: Nice to meet you. Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, if you want to join in this conversation, what is your family's migration story? Where did your family move from and why? Are you from the South? Are you African American? What kind of traditions and stories have been passed down in your family about the Great Migration? Give us a call. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out on social media at AllOfItWNYC. Kimberli, what does this exhibition add to what most people are taught or know about the Great Migration?

Kimberli Gant: Thank you. What this exhibition adds is really thinking about the Great Migration moment and the people that were a part of it in a more holistic way. We think we all know, and in our public school systems, we learn a snippet, a little bit of a glimpse.

This exhibition is discussing using art what has not really been told. The stories, as a title of the exhibition, discusses a movement in every direction, that this wasn't a journey purely from the southern to the northern parts of the United States, but a lot of individuals and families and communities remain in the southern part of United States migrated intra those different states, as well as for our particular iteration, the legacy of women, particularly in relation to the Great Migration, and their contributions with their own journeys, families, communities, et cetera.

Alison Stewart: Joshua, on one of the walls in the exhibition, there's this giant map of the United States, and it shows a first wave of migration and a second wave of migration. What kinds of opportunities were these Americans looking for, for themselves, for their families?

Joshua Guild: They're looking for housing that they can own, perhaps. They're looking for space. They're certainly looking for economic opportunities, for jobs. As Kimberli says, and as the exhibition, I think, expresses, the migration was typically thought of as unidirectional. People leaving the south, and it's often framed as something that's motivated in response to hardship, to violence, to trauma, all of which is true, but doesn't tell the full story and the fact that we should think about the Great Migration as being something that's multi-directional, that's dynamic, and that is really shaped by a multitude of factors of individual motivations. It's not really a simple story of push factors and pull factors as sometimes talked about in terms of migration, but people have a range of different motivations.

Alison Stewart: Joshua, what's something in our daily lives today that maybe we don't think about being tied to the Great Migration but is? Just something almost average.

Joshua Guild: Soul food. In every large city in the country, you can find soul food, but soul food is both African food and it's southern food. It's Black southern food. That has become really entrenched in our culture, in just about any major city in America. That's something that we take for granted, but we don't often think about as being directly tied to these roots of migration.

Alison Stewart: Kimberli, this exhibition premiered at the Mississippi Museum of Art in spring 2022. It travels to the Baltimore Museum of Art in the fall. Now that it's at the Brooklyn Museum, what is unique about the show in this iteration?

Kimberli Gant: I want to start by really acknowledging the originating curators, Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan Dennis, who gave such a great foundation and spent years in terms of research and working with the artists. I think what we tried to add to what they already did was focus it in terms of thinking about Brooklyn as a site for migration, a place that continues to be, has been, and will continue to be.

We borrowed some images looking at past depictions of Brooklyn, Coney Island, New York area, to really give visitors a bit of a historical grounding because a lot of the work is all contemporary, a lot of the work is very conceptual, and because one of the locations of the exhibition is in our Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, again, focusing on the legacy of women and feminism in regards to the Great Migration. As Professor Guild has mentioned, there is a lack of knowledge in more of the nuanced histories and discussions about the Great Migration, and women's legacies within that is one of those.

Alison Stewart: Professor Guild, when we think about women and women's role in the Great Migration, what would you want people to understand?

Joshua Guild: I think one of the things that we have to understand about migration, generally in the Great Migration specifically, is that it's often taught and thought about as an individual decision or as an individual journey, but people are tied to families and kinship networks, and women are so essential to that. They're so essential to how the migration actually unfolds when one person goes forward and they establish themselves, and then maybe they bring their children whom they left behind with grandchildren or extended family. That's part of what makes migration possible and allows families to reconstitute themselves in New York, in Chicago, in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, all the places that people ended up going.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Joshua Guild, associate professor of History of African American Studies at Princeton, and Kimberli Gant from the Brooklyn Museum. We're talking about a Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. We have some calls. Let's talk to Wendy, calling in from Springfield, New Jersey. Hi, Wendy, thanks for calling All Of It.

Wendy: Hi. Yes, my mother Josephine E. Jones came from Greenville, South Carolina in 1946 to Harlem to work as a cook in private homes. By 1967, she was the first Black woman in management at a Fortune 500 company Standard Brands, which is now Kraft Foods. The book of her life is in the Schaumburg for Scholars, and it's available for purchase at idabelpublishing.com. An Extraordinary Life: Josephine E. Jones, I'm her daughter.

Alison Stewart: Wendy, thank you so much. Thank you. We've got a reading assignment, everybody. Let's talk to Lisa who is calling in from Queens. Hi, Lisa, thanks for calling All of It.

Lisa: Hi, how are you guys doing?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Lisa: Okay. I just wanted to share my mother's story. She lived in a farm. It was the [unintelligible 00:07:41] farm in Mississippi, and they also had a school on the farm, and all of the people were teachers. My mother was in college, all-girl college, and she got pregnant by a Marine. They didn't get married, she was so embarrassed, so she moved to Harlem and lived with her grandmother, which was a professor in Harlem, a teacher. My grandmother, she lived until about 101.

To make a long story short, we had sharecroppers on our property. My mother tell the story all the time. To make a long story short, my mother became first a bartender, then she became a nurse, and we owned property and everything, but making a long story short, she couldn't stand the slavery, but sitting on the back [unintelligible 00:08:38] and she couldn't take that. My mother is like a Lena Horne lookalike. [laughter] To make a long story short, it was so much going on with the racism.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Lisa: My mother was beautiful, but she had to be a-- What do you call it? A living, like a housekeeper in a sense.

Alison Stewart: Like a domestic worker. Yes.

Lisa: It was a struggle for us, but we survived. These stories have to be told.

Alison Stewart: Lisa, I'm going to grab dive in here. Thank you so much for calling in and sharing your family's story. Professor Guild, I'm curious, just your reactions to our callers, something that you hear in their calls that you want to speak about or to address?

Joshua Guild: You hear aspiration, you hear social mobility. People moving to the north and starting usually in working class, entry-level kinds of jobs, whatever it took to survive, and being able to acquire education or experience and then create a different life for those that came after them.

Alison Stewart: Kimberli, there's a piece called An Ode to (You)'all (2022). It's really interesting. It's a card tapestry with rhinestones and it looks like it's based on a photograph. Tell us a little bit how this insulation pays homage to the women in this artist's family?

Kimberli Gant: Yes. The artist, Akea, did an incredible job in terms of trying to present a discussion about her great-grandmother and her sisters, the Phelps sisters. Also, she's a photographer, a documentarian. Really thinking about their creation of community, where they were, how they supported financially, emotionally, spiritually not only members of their family that did want to find other opportunities elsewhere, but also the community that stayed.

I think, as has been said, this establishing of new family units in other parts of the country, but also trying to maintain relationships to where they started and connected to so that those legacies and linchpins were not lost. They continued and just spread throughout other parts of the country.

Alison Stewart: Professor Guild, I was wondering how do we know what we know about the Great Migration? Who was documenting it? Who was chronicling it?

Joshua Guild: Well, first and foremost, as in all of African American and African diaspora history, we know what we know through family stories and stories that are-- the oral tradition is the key to it, but the Great Migration was incredibly well documented in its time as it was unfolding. First of all, the coverage in African American newspapers, in New York Amsterdam News, The Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American and others documented the influx of people traveling, but also had the letters page. People were writing letters about their experience of migrating. Many of those letters were collected.

We had contemporary scholars in that period such as Carter G. Woodson and other Black social scientists who were also writing about not only the social experience of the migrants, but the economic impact and some of the driving factors. W.B Du Bois was also important in documenting it. Then we have such a rich legacy of people now who have given oral history testimonies as the museum is now collecting in conjunction with this exhibition of people telling either their own story or the family story that goes on.

Then the other thing I would just add to think is really important to underscore, I said at the outset that this migration was unidirectional. People moved back and forth south to north and north to south. This is a thing that's really important to understand, is that, yes, many people left, but of course millions of people stayed behind and people maintained their family connections, they maintained sometimes their church connections, general community connections. People came back for weddings and funerals and graduations and family reunions, and many people now have started to settle back in the south. These connections, a lot of what we know is also because there are this dynamic interrelationship between the south and the rest of the country.

Alison Stewart: Kimberli, the audio component that's a part of this exhibition, tell us a little bit more about that.

Kimberli Gant: Yes, again, want to give complete credit to the originating curators there that we're continuing it on, but that can be done both through our website or through the pod that is in the exhibition at the end. Visitors are encouraged to spend-- you have about 10 minutes and you can record an oral history, and then you're given the option to send that to yourself electronically, and you can tag locations that you mentioned in the discussion and date it. Then it gets aggregated into this much larger mapping plan where you can then listen to other people's stories, you can see the routes and journeys that they took.

Now it's really become much more of a global discussion, which is another thing I think adds to our iteration here, because as we know, New York is filled with so many different communities, and one of the hopes of this is that visitors, even if they don't have a direct connection to the artists or to the story that's being told here, it will be used as inspiration to learn more about their own communities and legacies coming out of their own families.

Alison Stewart: Let's take another call. Serena's calling in from Florida. Hi, Serena.

Serena: Hi, there.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Serena: Oh, thank you for taking my call. I was born and raised in Brooklyn. My story is that my grandmother, my mother's mother, migrated to Brooklyn from Hilton Head Island in, I guess it was between 1915 and 1920. She was looking for better economic opportunity for herself and her two daughters, one of which was my mother. My mother was brought to Brooklyn when she was about four or five years old, and she grew up in Brooklyn. She was a Black woman who had a childhood experience of not growing up on a farm, but growing up in Brooklyn during those years.

She remembers living in East New York, Brooklyn, and living surrounded by children of immigrants, which they used to call refugees at that time. She grew up around Italian kids, Jewish kids, and she had experiences in early Brooklyn that she would tell me about. Those were her stories in her life. She did go back to South Carolina to visit. I have been back there to visit and it's a totally different type of environment, different living, but I was raised by a mom whose story if anyone heard it would say, "Well, that might not be an authentic Black story," because it's not the same as what they're used to hearing.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in, Serena, and sharing your story. Dr. Guild, I have my great-Aunt Leola was from Hephzibah, Georgia and moved to Bed-Stuy, and I wish I still had that house. [laughs] I remember hearing stories about her just taking people in, that that was part of it, that if you needed a place to stay and if you didn't have a job, you stayed with her until she got on her feet. Then when you got a job, they would just say there was always like a cake on the doorstep. Then that was part of it, taking care of one another.

Joshua Guild: Absolutely. Mutual aid is really the linchpin in some certain respects of the great migration, and that there are actually institutional structures that get created. There are hometown associations. You move to a new city, you can find people from your same hometown. Black churches, baptist churches, AME churches create state clubs, those you have. A particular church will have a Georgia Club, a North Carolina Club, a Virginia Club, again, a place where you can go for support.

Also, since we're talking about New York and talking about Brooklyn, we have to talk about Caribbean immigrants, who are everywhere in this story, that are migrating and settling alongside and parallel to these Black Southerners. If you listen to the words and the recollections of any of our great Black Brooklynites, whether you're talking about June Jordan, or Shirley Chisholm, or Randy Weston, the great jazz composer, they all described, in their childhoods growing up in central Brooklyn mainly, this encounter between Trinidadians and South Carolinians and Jamaicans and Georgians and sometimes Haitians or Cubans. This is part of the mix and part of I think what makes New York and Brooklyn in particular a little bit distinct in the Great Migration story.

Alison Stewart: The name of the exhibition is A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. It's at the Brooklyn Museum until June 25th. I've been speaking with Brooklyn Museum curator of modern and contemporary art, Kimberli Gant, and Professor Joshua Guild, associate professor of History and African American Studies at Princeton. Thank you so much for being with us.

Joshua Guild: Thank you for having me.

Kimberli Gant: Thank you so much. It was wonderful.

Alison Stewart: Thanks to all the callers who shared your family stories. We really appreciate you.

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Alison Stewart: So much more is happening on All Of It this week. The New York Restoration Project is giving away thousands of native trees this spring for free. On tomorrow's show, we'll speak with the head of the NYRP about the importance of urban trees and how to get one. I'll meet you back here tomorrow.

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